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Owner of PageF30.com.
Translator of Demian by Hermann Hesse into English - an interlinear translation for German students and those who want to see the original text.
http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/mithradates
Fluent in Japanese, Korean. Proficient in Mandarin, Turkish, German, French, Portuguese, others.

Friday, May 20, 2011

Well well, look what has recently been uploaded to YouTube!

It's a five-part (on YouTube that is) documentary on Kaliningrad, originally known as Königsberg. Unfortunately it has no English subtitles and is either in German or Russian with German subtitles - maybe some English here and there too, as I have yet to watch it. I found out about the video after visiting here for the first time in a while.

While still woefully uninformed on the region, I still imagine a solution to its isolation to be independence with a lot of Russian aid, with the end goal being a state within the EU that speaks Russian along with a certain amount of revived Prussian and maybe a smattering of German. If Russia were to agree on independence and a lot of funding for the new state, there is no reason why it wouldn't be an extremely Russia-friendly country through which Russian would become an official language of the EU for the first time. It would be a kind of Macau in the role it could play as a bridge between two large groups (Macau as a bridge between Portuguese countries and China, Kaliningrad/Königsberg as a bridge between Russia and the EU) and eventual visa-free travel to and from the EU would make it a prime destination for this. A German/French/Polish/etc. company that wants to expand into Russia would simply go there to set up a branch office and wouldn't have to worry about navigating Russian bureaucracy to do so.

Yes, I know that's not going to happen. It's another one of those "if I were king of the world" hypotheticals.